Creation and Destruction 1960–1966

Prunella Clough, Rockery, 1963  1962–3

Clough described her use of colour as ‘muffled, tonal, and murky’. Here, as the title suggests, she depicts a garden in which plants grow among heaped, rough stones. Clough became known as an abstract painter, but she saw her ‘subject matter mainly as landscape’. However, it was the feeling, not just the look of a place that mattered to her. She walked through the landscapes she wanted to paint, explaining: ‘the sense of place is crucial for me and involves sensations other than the purely optical ones of observation’.

Gallery label, June 2020

Prunella Clough, The White Root  1946

Clough’s first solo show in 1947 was at the Leger Gallery in London. It included still lifes and landscapes. Throughout the late 1940s, she visited the Suffolk Coast and her paintings from that time often show coastal subjects. The White Root features a bleached root structure, a wooden box or door and other debris. Although Clough painted it from observation, she focused on the abstract qualities of the root’s texture and shape.

Gallery label, April 2019

Prunella Clough, Corrugated Fence  1955

Prunella Clough, Wire and Demolition  1982

Clough’s paintings of urban and industrial scenes were often inspired by objects the artist noticed during walks around sites of interest. Here Clough references a piece of old wire discovered on a building site. Before studying art, Clough made maps for the US Office of War Information. The influence of this experience can be seen in her depiction of boundaries and fences in her paintings.

Gallery label, May 2019

Prunella Clough, Cooling Tower II  1958

One of Britain's most respected post-war painters, Prunella Clough developed a highly personalised visual language that hovered between abstraction and figuration. She frequently depicted urban or industrial motifs derived from her London environment, and she would set these against a soft, indeterminate background. The imposing tower structure of 'Cooling Tower II' has been simplified to its most basic form. It dominates the sky and dwarfs the smaller crane feature sitting to its right. However, the emphatic horizon line, characteristic of CLough's work, checks the overwhelming presence of the tower and balances the painting.

Gallery label, September 2004

Prunella Clough, Float  1950

Prunella Clough, Marsh Plants  1954

Prunella Clough, Fence/Climbing Plant  1978

Prunella Clough, Road to Wharf  1954

Road to Wharf 1954 is an oil painting that depicts a collection of solid abstract forms that, when considered as a whole, appear to show the back entrance to an industrial site like those found at the street entrance to a wharf. The canvas is split fairly evenly in half, the foregrounded composite shapes inhabiting the lower half. A grey-blue even sky punctuated by two dark grey towering frames make up the upper half of the work. The central right quadrant of the work is dominated by a large blue rectangle, framed on two sides by brown lines and on one by a red strip. One of the aforementioned tower constructions emerges from the framed rectangle above, while to its left emanate swirls of black, punctuated by orange and grey-blue daubs of colour. Below and to the left of this fused arrangement, straight and curved black lines cut the screen of dark beige-grey that anchors the bottom of the painting.

Prunella Clough, By the Canal  1976

Prunella Clough was born in London and studied at Chelsea School of Art. She had her first solo exhibition at the Leger Galleries in 1947 and three retrospective exhibitions at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London in 1960, the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield in 1972 and the Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh in 1976. Clough finds her subjects in the urban industrial landscape. Instead of making sketches on the spot she scrutinises particular motifs committing them to memory. Occasionally Clough takes photographs of aspects of the urban scene but these are not translated directly into paint. She likes to mix ash, sand or similar materials with her paints to give her pictures a sense of gritty strength.

Gallery label, September 2004

Prunella Clough, Stack  1993

Prunella Clough, Paper Bales  1960

Paper Bales 1960 is a large rectangular oil painting on canvas that depicts geometrically abstract bales of paper in a non-descript and anonymous setting. Mostly rendered in Clough’s signature drab palette of greys, blues, creams and beiges, the canvas is punctuated by dabs of orange that serve to disrupt the painting’s graph-like wall of paper that dominates its foreground. The paper’s overlapping linear forms concertina, the concentration of their colouring reminiscent of an unruly barbed wire fence. The principal plane of the bales is interrupted by a circular swirl – presumably of string – in the mid-right side of the work. The swirl’s disruption of Clough’s graphic scheme serves to anchor four of the five small abstract shapes that float in the grim cream sky that frames the paper bales horizontally from above.

Prunella Clough, Industrial Landscape  1954

Industrial Landscape 1954 is a portrait-oriented oil painting on canvas. A selection of geometric forms rendered with a flat expansive surface and mottled colouring make up the upper background of the work. A lightly maculated grey ground frames the painting’s foreground, which is punctuated by a configuration of textured orange swirls that bores upwards from the lower left corner of the work. A division of horizontal rectangular grey shapes knitted together by a thinner, vertical darker grey shape traverse the middle of the composition. In the upper third of the work, a selection of blue and grey rhombuses and looser rectangles rise, entwining with tight collections of straight black lines to form a selection of motley contours against the beige-grey ground that continues to the painting’s edge.